Alfred Blumstein
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 212045 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Alfred Blumstein |
| NOMBRES | Alfred |
| APELLIDO | Blumstein |
| FIRMA | BLUMSTEIN A |
| AFILIACIONES | Carnegie Mellon University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0748-8366 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 54 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 671 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 53 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1967 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2020 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Engineer to Operations Research to Criminology
In reflecting on my career trajectory, I find it very intriguing: from high school science to Cornell's first class in engineering physics and then on to early involvement in the new field of operations research on military and air transportation, which led to significant leadership roles there. I was then a naïve recruit in criminology in a role that involved quantitative analysis and concern for the total criminal justice system with an emphasi…
Science and Technology and the President's Crime Commission
The U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice added a Task Force on Science and Technology as somewhat of an afterthought because there had then been very little interaction between science and technology and the criminal justice system (CJS). The task force focused on the CJS as a whole and interactions among its parts, with an important emphasis on analysis of the operating systems and on the important potenti…
Linking Evidence and Criminal Justice Policy
Approaches to reducing both imprisonment and crime
International Crime and Justice
International crime and justice is an emerging field that covers international and transnational crimes that have not been the focus of mainstream criminology or criminal justice. This book examines the field from a global perspective. It provides an introduction to the nature of international and transnational crimes and the theoretical perspectives that assist in understanding the relationship between social change and the waxing and waning of …
Economic Conditions and Minority Violence
Redemption in the Presence of Widespread Criminal Background Checks
Criminal background checks have now become ubiquitous because of advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability. Also, a large number of individual criminal records have accumulated and have been computerized in state repositories and commercial databases. As a result, many ex‐offenders seeking employment could be haunted by a stale record. Recidivism probability declines with time “clean,” so some point in time …
Race and the Criminal Justice System
Federal Support of Local Criminal Justice Operations
Key Issues in Criminal Career Research
This 2007 book examines several contentious and under-studied criminal career issues using one of the world's most important longitudinal studies, the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), a longitudinal study of 411 South London boys followed in criminal records to age 40. The analysis reported in the book explores issues related to prevalence, offending frequency, specialization, onset sequences, co-offending, chronicity, career len…
Restore Rationality to Sentencing Policy
The Crime Drop and Beyond
Violent crime in the United States has traveled a striking path in the past 20 years, from a sharp spike in the late 1980s to a dramatic drop beginning around 1993 that lasted until a flattening occurred at the beginning of the new century. The upturn of the 1980s was driven almost exclusively by a sharp increase in gun violence among young people, whereas the downturn was a joint product of a turndown in youth violence and a steady drop in viole…
The Crime Drop in America
Violent crime in America shot up sharply in the mid-1980s and continued to climb until 1991, after which something unprecedented occurred. The crime level declined to a level not seen since the 1960s. This revised edition of The Crime Drop in America focuses first on the dramatic drop in crime rates in America in the 1990s, and then, in a new epilogue, on the patterns since 2000. The separate chapters written by distinguished experts cover the ma…
Cross-National Measures of Punitiveness
An Overview of the Symposium and Some Next Steps
This article identifies some overarching issues raised at the Albany Symposium on Developmental Criminology, with particular focus on important issues in conflict. In developing theory in this very complex area, there is tension between a parsimonious theory with a limited number of constructs and richer description that tries to capture more critical features. It seems that one concept is too limiting. The debate over the benefits of identifying…
The Criminal Career Paradigm
Criminal careers have long occupied the imaginations of criminologists. Since the 1986 publication of the National Academy of Sciences report on criminal careers and career criminals, a variety of theoretical, empirical, and policy issues have surfaced. Data on key criminal career dimensions of prevalence, frequency, specialization, and desistance have raised theoretical questions regarding the patterning of criminal activity over the life course…
Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung
Youth, Guns, and Violent Crime
Young people are overrepresented as both victims and perpetrators of violence. Indeed, some commentators have suggested that recent cohorts of youth have been composed of "superpredators" who have little regard for human life. The evidence, however, suggests that other factors are responsible for recent increases in youth gun violence. This article analyzes the extent and causes of youth violence in the United States, paying particular attention …
The Crime Drop in America
Assessing the Impact of Exposure Time and Incapacitation on Longitudinal Trajectories of Criminal Offending
The authors examine the potential effect of accounting for exposure time by examining the arrests of 272 serious offenders who were paroled at age 18 and followed through age 33. The authors describe the overall change in the arrest rate over the 16-year period, with and without adjustments for exposure time. The authors also estimate latent class models that decompose the heterogeneity of arrest rate trends, with and without variation in exposur…
Population Growth in U. S. Prisons, 1980-1996
State and federal incarceration rates grew by over 200 percent between 1980 and 1996. The dominant factor is drug offending, which grew by ten times, followed by assault and sexual assault. The growth can be partitioned among four stages: offending rates; arrests per offense; commitments to prison per arrest; and time served in prison, including time served on parole recommitments. The growth in incarceration for drugs is driven most strongly by …
Explaining Recent Trends in U.S. Homicide Rates
Alfred Blumstein, Richard Rosenfeld, Explaining Recent Trends in U.S. Homicide Rates, The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), Vol. 88, No. 4, Symposium: Why Is Crime Decreasing? (Summer, 1998), pp. 1175-1216
Relationship Between the Offending Frequency (Λ) of Imprisoned and Free Offenders
In the public debate over incarceration policy, there is considerable disagreement about what value of individual offending frequency (λ) is appropriate to use in estimating incapacitative effects. This article provides an approach for estimating the mean values of λ for diverse subsets of the total offender population, with particular emphasis on subsets generated by filtering through various stages of the criminal justice system. Sharp differen…
Tribute to Donald C. Stone
Youth Violence, Guns, and the Illicit-Drug Industry
Crime has become an issue of increasing importance to the American public.A growing fear of crime seems to pervade the nation and contributes to crime being reported as the nation's "most serious problem."'This Article examines some empirical aspects of changing crime patterns in recent years and identifies the nature of these changes more precisely than is possible from a typical press report or political debate.This Article concludes that the p…
Criminal Career Research
In a recent paper published in this journal, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986) 1 argue that the concepts of criminal careers, career criminals, selective incapacitation, prevalence, and incidence, and longitudinal studies all have little value for criminology. In our view their paper misrepresents these concepts and our research on these topics. We are pleased to have the opportunity in this paper to develop these concepts more clearly and to show t…
The Criminal Career Paradigm
Criminal careers have long occupied the imaginations of criminologists. Since the 1986 publication of the National Academy of Sciences report on criminal careers and career criminals, a variety of theoretical, empirical, and policy issues have surfaced. Data on key criminal career dimensions of prevalence, frequency, specialization, and desistance have raised theoretical questions regarding the patterning of criminal activity over the life course…
Redemption in the Presence of Widespread Criminal Background Checks
Criminal background checks have now become ubiquitous because of advances in information technology and growing concerns about employer liability. Also, a large number of individual criminal records have accumulated and have been computerized in state repositories and commercial databases. As a result, many ex‐offenders seeking employment could be haunted by a stale record. Recidivism probability declines with time “clean,” so some point in time …
Sentencing of Convicted Offenders
The results of a survey of public attitudes about appropriate length of prison sentences for convicted offenders are reported. Two main questions are addressed: 1) degree of consensus within the population about appropriate sentences for different offenses and 2) the relationship between the desired sentences expressed by the public and the actual time served by offenders in prison. The analysis suggests considerable agreement across various demo…
Assessing the Impact of Exposure Time and Incapacitation on Longitudinal Trajectories of Criminal Offending
The authors examine the potential effect of accounting for exposure time by examining the arrests of 272 serious offenders who were paroled at age 18 and followed through age 33. The authors describe the overall change in the arrest rate over the 16-year period, with and without adjustments for exposure time. The authors also estimate latent class models that decompose the heterogeneity of arrest rate trends, with and without variation in exposur…
Longitudinal and Criminal Career Research
Population Growth in U. S. Prisons, 1980-1996
State and federal incarceration rates grew by over 200 percent between 1980 and 1996. The dominant factor is drug offending, which grew by ten times, followed by assault and sexual assault. The growth can be partitioned among four stages: offending rates; arrests per offense; commitments to prison per arrest; and time served in prison, including time served on parole recommitments. The growth in incarceration for drugs is driven most strongly by …
Making Rationality Relevantthe American Society of Criminology 1992 Presidential Address
Trend and Deviation in Crime Rates
Trends and year‐to‐year deviations in UCR and NCS data on burglary and robbery are examined for the period 1973 to 1985. We find strong correspondence between year‐to‐year deviations in UCR crime rates and NCS victimization rates for both crime types. The difference between the two data series lies primarily in their contrasting trends, although there is some evidence that trends in UCR and NCS crime rates have been converging in recent years. Ex…
A Prospective Test of a Criminal Career Model
In an earlier article in this journal, Barnett, Blumstein, and Farrington (1987) formulated a model that described the criminal careers of the multiple offenders in a cohort of London males that had been studied from their 10th to 25th birthdays. That model involved two subpopulations of offenders (denoted as “frequents” and “occasionals”), each characterized by a constant annual conviction rate (μ) and a constant probability (p) of terminating t…
Probabilistic Models of Youthful Criminal Careers
This paper focuses on the characterization of the criminal careers of youthful offenders. It was found that these criminal careers could be modeled with parameters rejecting constant individual rates of offending and constant probability of career termination; population heterogeneity could be adequately represented by two distinct groups—designated here as “frequents” and occasionals.” These parameters were estimated for the multiple offenders i…
Prevalence and Recidivism in Index Arrests
It is important for both theoretical and policy reasons to partition aggregate crime rates into measures of prevalence (reflecting breadth of participation) and incidence (reflecting intensity of participation by those who do engage in crime). Prevalence is measured by accumulating over age the probability of first arrest as a function of age. Incidence is estimated by the probability of recidivism in a feedback model. The probability of a male i…
The Identification of “Career Criminals” From “Chronic Offenders” in a Cohort
The findings by Wolfgang et al. that 6.3% of their cohort had 52% of the recorded police contacts is well known. This retrospective analysis has been used to suggest that imprisoning these “chronic” offenders will avert a correspondingly disproportionate amount of crime. On prospective analysis of the arrest histories, however, the recidivism probability is found to be constant after the third contact, suggesting that prior record has little pred…
Seriousness Weights in an Index of Crime
The national of crime published annually by the FBI is one of the most commonly used social indicators. Many authors have criticized the FBI's index, an unweighted sum of the reported index for failing to account for the differing seriousness of the heterogeneous crimes in the index. Sellin and Wolfgang (1962) provide a procedure for developing crime-seriousness weights. An intense public debate has raged over which of these is correct. This pape…
The Crime Drop and Beyond
Violent crime in the United States has traveled a striking path in the past 20 years, from a sharp spike in the late 1980s to a dramatic drop beginning around 1993 that lasted until a flattening occurred at the beginning of the new century. The upturn of the 1980s was driven almost exclusively by a sharp increase in gun violence among young people, whereas the downturn was a joint product of a turndown in youth violence and a steady drop in viole…
Relationship Between the Offending Frequency (Λ) of Imprisoned and Free Offenders
In the public debate over incarceration policy, there is considerable disagreement about what value of individual offending frequency (λ) is appropriate to use in estimating incapacitative effects. This article provides an approach for estimating the mean values of λ for diverse subsets of the total offender population, with particular emphasis on subsets generated by filtering through various stages of the criminal justice system. Sharp differen…
Delinquency Careers
The Philadelphia birth cohort study's finding that 6 percent of the boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 experienced 52 percent of the cohort's arrests stimulated a variety of research and policy initiatives including, recently, those relating to selective incapacitation. Results from three other longitudinal delinquency studies-from London; Racine, Wisconsin; and Marion County, Oregon-parallel those of the Philadelphia study. A high percentage, typ…
Demographically disaggregated projections of prison populations
Not All Criminal Career Models Are Equally Valid
Key Issues in Criminal Career Research
This 2007 book examines several contentious and under-studied criminal career issues using one of the world's most important longitudinal studies, the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (CSDD), a longitudinal study of 411 South London boys followed in criminal records to age 40. The analysis reported in the book explores issues related to prevalence, offending frequency, specialization, onset sequences, co-offending, chronicity, career len…
Prison Populations
The dramatic rise in prison populations characteristic of the last fifteen years results from no single cause. The politicization of imprisonment policy, which began in the 1970s, and the changing age composition of the American population due to the postwar baby boom are important factors. One of the most troublesome aspects of prison populations is the overrepresentation of blacks. This cannot be explained solely or predominantly by racial disc…
The Ucr‐ncs Relationship Revisited
Restore Rationality to Sentencing Policy
Cross-National Measures of Punitiveness
Recidivism as a feedback process
Systems Analysis and the Criminal Justice System
The Science and Technology Task Force of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administra tion of Justice (hereinafter referred to as the National Crime Commission), as one of its forward-reaching endeavors, exam ined how science and technology might contribute to the control of crime and to the operations of the criminal justice system. This paper reports on some studies concerning the potential role of systems analysis. Alternative …
A National Program of Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice
A Theory of the Stability of Punishment
One of the more interesting theses advanced by Durkheim, and subsequently by others, is that crime is a "normal" and not a pathological attribute of society "provided that it attains and does not exceed a certain level for each social type."I Durkheim meant by this that a particular level of crime is "an integral part of all healthy societies." 2 Far from being some aberrant form of societal maladjustment, it is a necessary result of the same phe…
Recidivism as a feedback process
Seriousness Weights in an Index of Crime
The national of crime published annually by the FBI is one of the most commonly used social indicators. Many authors have criticized the FBI's index, an unweighted sum of the reported index for failing to account for the differing seriousness of the heterogeneous crimes in the index. Sellin and Wolfgang (1962) provide a procedure for developing crime-seriousness weights. An intense public debate has raged over which of these is correct. This pape…
The Deterrent Effect of Legal Sanctions on Draft Evasion
Research on deterrent and incapacitative effects of criminal sanctions
On Estimating the Response of Draft Evasion Rates to Legal Sanctions
Estimation of Individual Crime Rates from Arrest Records
Not all police agencies report arrests to the FBI; in 1976, arrests were reported for an estimated population of 175,499,000, or 82.6 percent of the estimated total population of 212,420,000 in 1976.The arrest rates per population each age are estimated from the ratio of reported arrests to 82.6 percent of the total population in each age group.This amounts to an assumption that the age distribution of the population in the jurisdictions reportin…
Deterrence and Incapacitation
Demographically disaggregated projections of prison populations
The Identification of “Career Criminals” From “Chronic Offenders” in a Cohort
The findings by Wolfgang et al. that 6.3% of their cohort had 52% of the recorded police contacts is well known. This retrospective analysis has been used to suggest that imprisoning these “chronic” offenders will avert a correspondingly disproportionate amount of crime. On prospective analysis of the arrest histories, however, the recidivism probability is found to be constant after the third contact, suggesting that prior record has little pred…
Sentencing of Convicted Offenders
The results of a survey of public attitudes about appropriate length of prison sentences for convicted offenders are reported. Two main questions are addressed: 1) degree of consensus within the population about appropriate sentences for different offenses and 2) the relationship between the desired sentences expressed by the public and the actual time served by offenders in prison. The analysis suggests considerable agreement across various demo…
On the Racial Disproportionality of United States' Prison Populations
One of the most distressing and troublesome aspects of the operation of the criminal justice system in the United States is the severe disproportionality between blacks and whites in the composition of prison populations. Although blacks comprise roughly one-eighth of the population, they represent about one-half of the prison population. Thus, the race-specific incarceration rates (the ratio of prisoners to population within each racial group) a…
Prevalence and Recidivism in Index Arrests
It is important for both theoretical and policy reasons to partition aggregate crime rates into measures of prevalence (reflecting breadth of participation) and incidence (reflecting intensity of participation by those who do engage in crime). Prevalence is measured by accumulating over age the probability of first arrest as a function of age. Incidence is estimated by the probability of recidivism in a feedback model. The probability of a male i…
Making do
Selective Incapacitation as a Means of Crime Control
Research on Sentencing
Delinquency Careers
The Philadelphia birth cohort study's finding that 6 percent of the boys born in Philadelphia in 1945 experienced 52 percent of the cohort's arrests stimulated a variety of research and policy initiatives including, recently, those relating to selective incapacitation. Results from three other longitudinal delinquency studies-from London; Racine, Wisconsin; and Marion County, Oregon-parallel those of the Philadelphia study. A high percentage, typ…
Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals,"
By focusing attention on individuals rather than on aggregates, this book takes a novel approach to studying criminal behavior. It develops a framework for collecting information about individual criminal careers and their parameters, reviews existing knowledge about criminal career dimensions, presents models of offending patterns, and describes how criminal career information can be used to develop and refine criminal justice policies. In addit…
Probabilistic Models of Youthful Criminal Careers
This paper focuses on the characterization of the criminal careers of youthful offenders. It was found that these criminal careers could be modeled with parameters rejecting constant individual rates of offending and constant probability of career termination; population heterogeneity could be adequately represented by two distinct groups—designated here as “frequents” and occasionals.” These parameters were estimated for the multiple offenders i…
Prison Populations
The dramatic rise in prison populations characteristic of the last fifteen years results from no single cause. The politicization of imprisonment policy, which began in the 1970s, and the changing age composition of the American population due to the postwar baby boom are important factors. One of the most troublesome aspects of prison populations is the overrepresentation of blacks. This cannot be explained solely or predominantly by racial disc…
Longitudinal and Criminal Career Research
Criminal Career Research
In a recent paper published in this journal, Gottfredson and Hirschi (1986) 1 argue that the concepts of criminal careers, career criminals, selective incapacitation, prevalence, and incidence, and longitudinal studies all have little value for criminology. In our view their paper misrepresents these concepts and our research on these topics. We are pleased to have the opportunity in this paper to develop these concepts more clearly and to show t…
A Prospective Test of a Criminal Career Model
In an earlier article in this journal, Barnett, Blumstein, and Farrington (1987) formulated a model that described the criminal careers of the multiple offenders in a cohort of London males that had been studied from their 10th to 25th birthdays. That model involved two subpopulations of offenders (denoted as “frequents” and “occasionals”), each characterized by a constant annual conviction rate (μ) and a constant probability (p) of terminating t…
Criminology (44 obras) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (40 obras) · Political science (38 obras) · Psychology (38 obras) · Sociology (30 obras) · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (28 obras) · Law (28 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Computer Science (19 obras) · Criminal justice (19 obras)